Baths in the bedroom: the chic of it

They are all the rage at posh hotels but should you sink money into one at home?

As a travel writer, I've stayed in hundreds of five-star hotel rooms and learnt both to appreciate their finer points (luxury bed linen may be pricey, but, trust me, it's worth it) and to dismiss the more gimmicky excesses (I once slept very well on a £14,000 Ammique King bed - mind you, I've slept just as well on beds that cost a fraction of that price). The thought of yet another muslin-draped four-poster is enough to bore me to sleep standing up.

What hoteliers do with bathrooms, however, can be genuinely exciting. At Maia, in the Seychelles, for example, a square stone bath in my villa was sunk into its own infinity pool, steps from the foot of my bed. At Soho House, in New York, my suite was dominated by an extraordinary bath that looked like half a giant dinosaur's egg. At Barnsley House, in the Cotswolds, our split-level